How to: Fix OS X Dock randomly moving between screens

The Mac OS dock is a thing of beauty. It’s look and feel have been recreated on various other devices, even as a tool (Rocketdock) for Windows.

Under OS X Mavericks I recently found a minor frustration with the dock though. It appeared to randomly keep switching which of my two monitors it would call home.

I couldn’t put my finger as to why, nor could I find a way to re-create the problem. It just happened and the only way I found to put it back where I wanted it was to reboot.

It seems I wasn’t alone given several threads over on the Apple Discussion forums. There is, thankfully, a simple way to restore your dock to its rightful place and you may be surprised to learn that the moving of the dock isn’t actually a bug but a feature!

“If you move the mouse to another window and pull it down to very bottom of the screen and hold it there, the dock moves over. To move it back, move the mouse pointer to the screen you want it on and hold the pointer at the very bottom of the screen.“

I was able to recreate my “problem” and, for want of a better phrase, “fix it” too!